Hartford, Conn. — Sometimes you can get it done in five words, and Jim Boeheim, the soul of brevity, did just that at the back end of Wednesday’s clanging night in Connecticut.

“We,” the big man said, “didn’t shoot so well.”

The stat sheet caught anything Boeheim’s eyes may have missed and ears might not have heard because it showed that the Syracuse University Orange put up 65 shots against the UConn Huskies and doinked 42 of them.

Too harsh? OK, let’s be more charitable and put it this way: Forty-two of the SU heaves, including 19 of the 23 that had been lofted from beyond the arc, somehow failed to find twine.

“I mean, we had great looks,” Trevor Cooney, the freshman guard, insisted after the Orange’s 66-58 loss to the Club On The Road To Nowhere. “Two of C.J.’s were down and came out. Same with Brandon. Same with James. They just weren’t falling for us. You have nights like that.”

Be advised that the Syracuse bunch, ranked No. 6 in a nation filled with pretty-good-but-not-great teams, most assuredly did before a crowd of 13,518 that included the retired Jim Calhoun but none of those Connecticut guys who defected after their program was declared unclean after last season.

It got beat on the boards, sure. And more than one player offered that SU had lost the loose-ball battle. And UConn’s three-headed backcourt of Ryan Boatwright, Omar Calhoun and Shabazz Napier — Quick, Quicker, Quickest … in the order of your choice — did combine for 42 points, which may or may not have served as a referendum on the Orange defense.

But facts are facts. And Wednesday’s most obvious fact was that that Syracuse, which authored its second-worst shooting effort of the campaign, could not have dropped the ball into a lake if it was standing on deck of a barge. And so, it fell, on merit, to 20-4.

“It was the shooting,” declared C.J. Fair. “We made some shots early and then we went cold.”

SU did this against an outfit, deemed “pesky” by James Southerland, that sits in the probationary limbo assigned to it by the NCAA. As such, the Huskies will play no games beyond their regular-season finale on March 9. There will be no Big East Tournament, no NCAA Tournament, no National Invitation Tournament … nothing. Not for this Connecticut edition.

And yet — without Calhoun on the bench and with some 3,000 empty seats inside the XL Center saluting the last Big East Tournament affair that will ever feature these two schools, one against the other — the thin Huskies rumbled on Wednesday.

“We’re playing for the love of each other,” announced Kevin Ollie, UConn’s head coach, after orchestrating the upset. “We’re playing for the pride of getting better. They can’t ban us from that.”

The Orange? It’s not banned from anything and will, with a decent seed, head off to the big Tournament next month. But a lesson was re-learned in this New England town, and it was that Syracuse, like a lot of others out there, is a fragile group.

Which suggests that if Boeheim’s five words are spoken again in March … well, it’d probably be for the last time this season.

(Bud Poliquin's columns/commentaries appear virtually every weekday morning on syracuse.com. His work can also be regularly found on the pages of The Post-Standard newspaper. Additionally, he can be heard, Mondays through Fridays between 10 a.m.-12 noon, on "The Bud & The Manchild" sports-talk radio show on The Score 1260-AM. Poliquin can be reached at bpoliquin@syracuse.com.)